Maxis finally admits Sim City cock up

Maxis General Manager Patrick Buechner has admitted that the March launch of an online version of Sim City was a bad decision.

He said even before the launch it was obvious to Maxis that many Sim City fans were not going to be happy with its online-only design, even once the servers were stabilised. Buechner said that Maxis should have allowed for local saves and offline play. Update 10 will correct that mistake nearly a year later.

He said that getting to this point had been a huge challenge due to fundamental engineering problems stemming from the initial “creative choice” that committed the design team to the unpopular online system. For the first several months, the team had to focus its updates on stabilising the online servers so that people were no longer being denied access to the game they had paid for when they tried to play it.

The next round was aimed at fixing the traffic flow problems that paralyzed cities over a certain size and other simulation upgrades. It was not until August of 2013 that Maxis was able to turn its efforts to implementing offline mode. Maxis had to rewrite much of the server code which had originally done in the Java in C++ in order to make it run locally on PCs.